Saturday, February 16, 2013

Do you ever wonder about post-use plumbing? Do you ever
spare a thought for the journey taken by your grey water? Do you just flush and
forget?

Well, I know exactly where everything
goes, because we have a brand new drainage system.

Rural France doesn’t have mains sewerage: parts of it
are being connected up to locally centralised systems, but that costs money,
and money is in short supply. However, the various drainage inspection bodies
around the country go on looking into our domestic arrangements, and grading
them like essays. Our last house had an adequate system – that’s the equivalent
of a B-: good in parts, but needs editing. This house had an F: go away and
start again. They charge you for the privilege of undergoing this mandatory
inspection, and the cost varies according to the whim of the governing body:
anything from 80€ to 300€.

Nothing changes: there’s money in waste. Well into the 20th century, there used to be a
man who collected ‘night soil’ from a special container at the bottom of your
garden, where you emptied the gazunders (the pot that goes under the bed), and
he would take it away and turn it into usable compost matter. In earlier times,
the liquid content would be collected by the lady of the house and, after 3
weeks or so in a pot in a little-visited corner of the yard, whilst no-one was looking, it would turn itself into ammonia. She
would mix this with wood ash – lye – and strain it through straw, and soak the linens
in it. She’d then go and beat the living daylights out of them in a stream,
which was just one reason why you did not drink the water.

Today, away from mains drainage, we have septic tanks. Ours
is 3000litres: it lives in a deep hole, so that only the twin covers peep over
the soil surface.There are pipes going
into it and out from it, as though it were the beating heart of the house and garden.
Which, actually, it is: if your toilet or your drains are blocked, everything
stops and panic ensues. You are only a flush away from domestic disaster.

The upside of having this work done, by a man with a Big
Digger, is that we now have a blank canvas of a garden. The tree roots are
gone, the remains of a chicken run discovered and removed, and nothing left to
mow. I took cuttings of the old roses that had been strangled by nettles and
brambles, all of which have rooted (to my less-than-green-fingered amazement).He Who Does Everything Around Here, who was dreaming
of rows of onions and courgettes and beans and sundry edibles, is disappointed –
these are not to be grown in the ground within 3 metres of the soakaway which
runs under the place where the lawn used to be. To fit into our garden this had to be done on
four 15metre lengths, so accounts for a large area. But he’ll find a way:
perhaps he could use some of those pieces of timber that lurk in the workshop for
a raised bed? It’s a man thing, it seems, to collect wood at the end of some
job, and then never use it in case it’s needed for something else.

We now know that the old system didn’t have a proper soakaway,
but that a large unexplained pipe ran across the courtyard and seems to have dumped
the contents into the lane, within a couple of metres of a well. When we were
being inspected, we never found this: but as we had to do an archaeological exploration
to unearth one tank (500litres, not emptied in 16 years), and to discover that
there wasn’t a tank at all for the other house, this isn’t surprising. Where would
you dig? Now that the new pipes have been covered up, I’m not exactly sure
where they are, and I only saw them yesterday.

However, I know they’re there, doing the job they were
created to do. One day, some four years
from now, we could stand and watch our past lives pass before our very eyes as
the tank is emptied out (why do they use transparent pipes for that?); but for
now, we can be secure in the knowledge that we’ve earned an A++ this time.

Now we have to plan a new garden; but we won’t be making a
big thing of the water feature.

About Me

Moved to France in 2004, to the Vienne. Moved up to Brittany in 2010, to renovate a couple of houses and a cottage. I write an online advice column, and fiction, and cook sustaining food,whilst he who does everything around here slaves over a hot drill, chainsaw, router, trowel, cable, ladder....